It seems a film about the murder of a Chinese-American and subsequent non-punishment sentencing of his two killers had made it into the National Film Registry. Here’s a snippet on YouTube.

If it wasn’t for the fact that the Return of The Jedi and Selena was on the list, this news might not have even popped up in my news feed.

You can read the details on Wikipedia, but basically two man, unprovoked, bludgeoned a Chinese-American to death, identifying him based on mistaken race (they had wanted to punish a Japanese person). They were fined $3000 and let off with probated jail sentence (didn’t go to jail at all) There’s some additional details about his murder succeeding shortly after his bachelors party, the white men hunted him for 30 minutes with baseball bat in hand, paying for information regarding his whereabouts along the way, as well as the sentencing judge zealously defending his decision. Apparently, lot of pretty nasty things happened in Michigan in 1982… wow that was just a few years before my family began to immigrate to the USA…

One is glad to say that with respect to racially based violent crimes have become less tolerable to society and maybe even the law enforcement and adjudication systems in recent decades.

There are still some aspects that kind of popped out at me. In the movie, the arresting police officers stated that they were not informed of the trial at all, much less where they given chances to testify to what happened. This mysterious way in which legal procedures work is definitely beyond the mortals who suffer it. The things these judges and lawyers are saying, the whitesplaining, sounds quite similar to what we see on TV today.

In fact, it seems the whitesplaining techniques are being actively promoted as desirable features of our legal systems. “Plea bargaining” frequently being a tool for good. Selecting judges who are favorable to race and cause seem to be the open non-secret, you can do that, find a judge who loves your race more than your murderers and robbers… The fact that there are such judges, can make for multiple prime-time TV shows to show everyone—It happens! These things are being promoted as good features of our society by TV media in America.

But really, for a person like myself, I cannot help but have deep deep suspicion about the legal system. That it works, I have no doubt about, that it is just and fair, I have to claim to be agnostic. In the grand scheme of the Bible that courts swear by, none of these little things matter. But to each person there, each person is responsible personally. Whatever people think they have personally in connection in the grander justice, that’s just fellow human being thinking.

I suppose it is a double edged sword if one to look at the question selfishly. The ability to find a path through the legal system favorable to oneself is desirable. But when it comes to the legal thoughts around making judgement considering maintenance of long term versus short term justice, as well as the immediate stability of society(eg riot prevention), I must admit naïveté—I don’t know what y’all thought you thought, but I sure as heck don’t trust it. Whatever produced a $3000 license to kill a chinaman, that’s just not just.

But if we were to apply our scientific and technological skills, would we actually arrive at a more trustworthy system? Present attempts to use data driven system has been met with challenges as soon as they were discovered. But, here too one has to feel just a bit suspicious that before Propublica broke the story, how many people in America even knew that the courts used AI to help sentencing?

(Sentencing being one of the problems in Chin’s case, even after plea bargaining at least one of the perps could have at least a decade of jail, but he didn’t get it. And team compass would be telling me hey look, the judge made the right call, he did not recidivate by bludgeoning another Chinaman)

We don’t know what is behind all this legal-smancy mumble jumbo. At least for a while there, there was an AI making predictions of probability of recividism in the mix. That feature was added to the legal system without any announcements. People are not even informed that things are changing under the hood.

One wonders if this part of our democracy is a problem? We seem to vote for both executive and legislative branches of the government, it the judicial branch is opaque and not democratically elected. The judicial branch doesn’t have any mandates to satisfy the will of the people. The judicial branch doesn’t even have mandates to make itself understandable to its subjects.

So I guess this is one of those perma-answers to some GCI questions:

• We can’t give it training data because training data we have is corrupt. All of us now do not all agree with all the results in the historical data.
• We can’t really generatively explain what the right thing is by programming it. And more importantly we cannot all agree to that single program.
• We can’t really tell if an original answer the GCI gives is correct or not because we don’t know or we think nobody really knows.
• We can tell the GCI what each individual feels and thinks. But many prospect domains of GCI do not operate democratically. (Both operations and sample-importance perspectives.)
• The new domain, new to GCI, exists partially because of its opacity to outside understanding. GCI may have to forsake it’s built in transparency(and other beneficial features) in order to be accepted into the new domain such as the judicial system.